Under a DACA amnesty, American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill. About one in five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one in seven would go on Medicaid. Since DACA’s inception under Obama, more than 2,100 illegal aliens have been kicked off the program after it was revealed that they were either criminals or gang members. JOHN BINDER

Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been
emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a
presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the
blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media.

*

In what’s
shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying
behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will
effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy,
but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First”
agenda.

AMERICA'S SORRY STATE

“And the causes are complicated. A big part of

the story is the ascendency of corporate

America at the same time that American

communities were being defenestrated.”

It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards.

I'd point you to two recent pieces that you simply have to read in order to understand America as it exists now. The first is by my colleague Christopher Caldwell, writing about the opioid epidemic over at First Things. It's an amazing, magisterial piece.

In taking full measure of where we are and how we got here, Caldwell argues that the scope of the problem we face is difficult to fully comprehend:

Salisbury, Massachusetts (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1638, and the opium crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The town lost one young person in the decade-long Vietnam War. It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years. Last summer, Huntington, West Virginia (pop. 49,000), saw twenty-eight overdoses in four hours. Episodes like these played a role in the decline in U.S. life expectancy in 2015. The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises. . . .

A heroin scourge in America's housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000. The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his soul ballad "Freddie's Dead." The crack epidemic of the mid- to late 1980s was worse, with a death rate reaching almost two per 100,000. George H. W. Bush declared war on drugs. The present opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 people per 100,000, and that is without the fentanyl-impacted statistics from 2016. In some states it is far worse: over thirty per 100,000 in New Hampshire and over forty in West Virginia.

And the causes are complicated.

A big part of the story is the

ascendency of corporate America

at the same time that American

communities were being

defenestrated.

But it also has something to do with a culture that can't say no to anything, that doesn't believe in taboo, that feels the need to excuse and expunge and relieve people of agency.

The other blockbuster essay comes from my friend Nick Eberstadt in the new issue of Commentary.(And by the by, if you haven't subscribed to Commentary,you should. It's a truly great magazine.) In "Our Miserable 21st Century" Eberstadt takes a more general, 30,000-foot view of modern America. He examines reams of data—on finances, income, health, social mobility, and more—and the picture he paints is one of a nation in serious trouble. Decline, even.

Take economic growth: Economists now

believe that the potential growth rate for the

United States—that is, the rate at which the

economy would grow at full employment—is

just 1.7 percent. Which means that the long-

term growth rate is under 1 percent. The

work rates for the population have similarly

been revised downward. The rosy

unemployment numbers you hear on the

news are based on the assumption that the

percentage of Americans in the labor force

will never again be as high as it was in 2001.

BLOG: DURING OBAMA'S EIGHT YEARS of OPEN BORDERS, 2/3 OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN OR ILLEGALS!

Here's Eberstadt:

As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation's work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers.

They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

What's worse, this collapse of work post-2000 has coincided with an explosion of wealth for the wealth-holders.

There's no way for these opposing trends to lead to either economic or cultural or political stability.

It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards. Where geographic mobility is in its third straight decade of decline and social mobility is collapsing, too. In 1977, the average 30-year-old was almost a sure bet to be earning more money than his parents were making at the same age—he had an 86 percent chance. Today, his odds are just about even-money—51 percent.

Like I said, go read Eberstadt's sensational piece. This is the America of 2017. Donald Trump isn't Reagan. And morning isn't coming.

UNDER BANKSTER-OWNED
BARACK OBAMA, TWO-THIRDS OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN, BOTH LEGAL AND
ILLEGAL.

Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found
themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more
than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level. Millions
more now live in “high poverty” districts of 20-40 percent poverty, according
to recently released report by the Brookings Institution.

Stacey Dash: Obama 'Bamboozled' Us: Actress and Fox News cultural pundit Stacey Dash said on Thursday that President Barack Obama was elected because Americans believed the first black president could heal racial divides in the country but the opposite has happened.

Stacey Dash: Obama 'Bamboozled' Us

(CNSNews.com) – Actress and Fox News cultural pundit Stacey Dash said on Thursday that President Barack Obama was elected because Americans believed the first black president could heal racial divides in the country but the opposite has happened.

“I think he bamboozled us,” Dash said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. “I think we all got blacked into it.

“We all voted for him because we believed, ‘Yes, it’s time to have a black president. He is going to unite us in a very profound way,’” Dash said.

“What did he do? The exact opposite,” she said.

CNSNews.com asked Dash about Obama’s election and the hope that he would heal racial divides and why the country now seems more divided than ever.

“I think that’s the case, because I think he bamboozled us,” Dash said. “I think we all got blacked into it.

“We all voted for him because we believed, ‘Yes, it’s time to have a black president. He is going to unite us in a very profound way,’” Dash said.

“What did he do? The exact opposite,” she said.

CNSNews.com also asked Dash what the next president should do to improve race relations.

“So what’s the next guy going to have to do?” Dash said. “He’s going to have to unite us in a very profound, blatant, hardcore way.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “It’s going to be war. It is.

“It’s going to be war, because there’s going to be people who say, ‘Oh no, white people, I don’t want to have anything to do with them,’ and ‘black people, I don’t want anything to do with them,’ and we the people, who do want to be united have to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to educate you,’ because I believe education is the big integrator,” she said.

“If we educate you, then unity will come, and until we understand that, unless we’re united, we will never be a great country until we understand that we’re in this conundrum,” Dash said.

“Mark
Levin called Obama’s effort “police state” tactics, and suggested that Obama’s
actions, rather than conspiracy theories about alleged Russian interference in
the presidential election to help Trump, should be the target of congressional
investigation.”

*

Daniel
Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center,
believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY) “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild
than the Clinton Foundation ever was.”

THE OBAMA WAR ON AMERICA: His OFA Party is Dedicated to Destroying
American and Building the Obama Muslim-style dictatorship funded by crony
banksters.

Daniel
Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center,
believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY) “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild
than the Clinton Foundation ever was.”

*

"Obama is no
fool and he understands -- having encouraged Black Lives Matter and the war on
police and law enforcement, having facilitated ballooning welfare rolls and
doubling student debt to $1.35 trillion, having presided over a flood of
immigrants illegally crossing the southern border, and having pushed
unprecedented deficit spending that added nearly a trillion dollars annually to
the federal debt and doubling that debt in eight years to $20 trillion -- that
the U.S. is nearer collapse than at any previous time. And every Marxist knows
that socialist transformation first requires collapse of the old order."

*

PSYCHOPATH!

THE LEGACY of BARACK OBAMA: MUSLIM
PSYCHOPATH AND BANKSTER RENT BOY WHO CAME NEAR TO CREATING A MUSLIM-STYLE
DICTATORSHIP BY SABOTAGING AMERICA’S HOMELAND SECURITY AND FUNDING THE MEXICAN
FASCIST RACIST PARTY of LA RAZA.

The WSWS has reported several
times that during Obama’s administration the wealth of the richest 400
Americans grew from $1.57 trillion to $2.4 trillion and the stock market
enjoyed one of its most successful runs in history.

Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested

administration!

BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!

“Citigroup’s recommendations came just
three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the
Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion
in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single
biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion
in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306
billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related
assets.”

“As president, Obama not
only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a
single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for

the orgy of speculation and
swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and
he personally intervened to block legislation capping

executive pay at bailed-out
firms.”

“So
when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while
investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street
banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged
in prison.”

NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS
NOR INFESTED HIS ADMIN WITH BANKSTER CRONIES MORE THAN OBAMA!

*

And
while the Obama administration worked systematically to bail out the banks and
make the financial oligarchy richer than ever, shielding the architects of the
Great Recession from criminal prosecution, it did impose fines for some of the
banks’ grossest swindles, including the sale of worthless subprime
mortgage-backed securities, the rigging of key global interest rates such as
the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), drug money laundering, illegal home
foreclosures and other illicit activities.

HSBC laundered hundreds of
millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible
for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past
two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug
trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in

Mexico, which is known for
dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.

March 6, 2017

Obama, president of 'historic firsts'...and not in a good way

Now that the #Obamagate wiretapping scandal is on us, with voters wondering "did he or didn't he" bug the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, as the latter charged Saturday, it's worth it to look at the president's style of governing. The estimable Doug Ross of Director Blue has a list of historic "firsts" of the Obama presidency, most of which show abuse of power in a pattern so repetitive it's impossible not to think this could go farther.

You can be the judge of whether or not Obama had it in him to bug the candidacy of Trump. But check out Doug's list to see what Obama's leadership character pattern amounts to.

As an old journalist buddy of mine from the foreign correspondent front in Africa said upon his return to the states: "I spent 20 years in the jungles here, serving my country in a way ... only to return home to an African dictator." He saw the pattern then. Ross's list might show the pattern to many more.

• First President to Refuse to Tell the Public What He Did For Eight (8) Hours After Being Informed That a U.S. Ambassador Was Facing Imminent Death During a Terror Attack (Source:Mediate)

• First President to Lie About the Reason For an Ambassador's Death, Blaming it on an Internet Video Rather Than What He Knew to be the Case: the Al Qaeda-linked Terror Group Ansar al-Sharia (Source:House Oversight Committee, et. al.)

• First President to Have an Innocent Filmmaker Thrown in Jail After Lying About the Cause for a Deadly Attack on U.S. Diplomats, Using the Filmmaker as a Scapegoat (Source:CNN)

• First President to Use the IRS to "Unfairly Target Political Enemies" as Well as pro-Catholic and pro-Jewish Groups (Source:Sen. Ted Cruz)

• First President to Unlawfully Seize Telephone Records of More than 100 Reporters to Intimidate and/or Bully Them (Source:Associated Press)

• First President to Witness a Single Cabinet Secretary Commit Multiple Hatch Act Violations Without Acting, Speaking Out, Disciplining or Firing That Person (Source:New York Times)

• First President to Systematically Release Detained Illegal Aliens Charged With Homicide Into the U.S. Population (Source:USA Today)• First President to Release 40,000 Illegal Aliens with Serious and/or Violent Criminal Records Inside the U.S. (Source:Judicial Watch)• First President to Create Secret Police Units Inside Government Agencies to Block Lawful Investigations by Inspectors General (Source:Associated Press)

• First President to Attempt to Block Legally-Required 60-Day Layoff Notices by Government Contractors Due to His Own Cuts to Defense Spending -- Because The Notices Would OccurBeforethe Election. (Source:National Journal)

• First President to IntentionallyDisable Credit Card Security Measures(in order to allow over-the-limit donations, foreign contributions and other illegal fundraising measures -Source: Power Line)

• First President to have the EPA conduct hazardous experiments on the ill, infirm and elederly to push a radical environmental agenda, in a manner not dissimilar to the Third Reich's inhuman medical experiments (Source:The EPA Office of the Inspector General).• First President to be Accused by His Own Party of Ordering the CIA to Spy on Congress (Source:Washington Post)

• First President to allow deadly Ebola disease-ridden patients to enter the U.S., refusing to restrict travel from infected countries like other Western allies (Source:New York Daily News)

• First president to order his EPA to unilaterally overturn a Federal Statute (changing the borders of Wyoming established by an act of Congress,Source:Casper Star-Tribune).• First president to systematically delay enacting a wide variety of controversial rules until after a presidential election (Source:Washington Post)• First president to have Politifact designate one of his statements "Lie of the Year" (Source:Politifact)

• First President to Strip Inspectors General of Ability to Investigate Corruption and Fraud in the Federal Government (Source:Washington Times).• First President to Create a Secret Racial Database of Americans in Order to Determine "Inequities" in Housing, Employment, Banking, etc. (Source:New York Post).• First President to Intentionally Release Thousands of Illegal Alien Rapists and Child Molesters into the U.S. Instead of Deporting Them (Source:Boston Globe•••First President toTell Killers 'They Are Product of Racist Criminal Justice System'(Source: Sheriff David Clarke)• First President to be Named by the Associated Press to Have Operated the Least Transparent Administration in History (since the advent of the Freedom of Information Act; Source:Associated Press)• First President to Have Its Own Watchdogs Report That More Than $125 Billion in Fraudulent/Improper Payments Were Made by the Federal Government (Source:Associated Press)

• First President to Leave the American Middle Class No Longer the World’s Richest (Source:The New York Times)• First President to Retaliate Against a Rating Agency for Downgrading the United States Debt (Source:Investor's Business Daily)• First President to Expand the Regulatory State to an Unprecedented Degree ("New record: Feds issued 56 regs for every new law, 3,659 in 2013",Source:Washington Examiner)

Energy Policy

• First President to Endanger the Stability of the Electric Grid by Shutting Down Hundreds of Coal-Fired Plants Without Adequate Replacement Technologies (Source:National Electric Reliability Corporation- PDF)

• First President to Negotiate a Deal to Transfer $150 Billion to the World's Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism (Source:Gatestone Institute)• First President to Operate His National Security Infrastructure So Incompetently That an Enemy of the United States was Able to Steal the Personnel Records of all Four Million Government Employees (Source:CNN).• First President to Operate His National Security Infrastructure So Incompetently That His Secretary of State Created Her Own Private Email Servers to Evade Public Open Records Laws (Source:The Verge)

Judicial Watch: Only Crimes in Russia Scandal Are from ‘Obama Gang’

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Government transparency activist group Judicial Watch has filed aFreedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuitagainst the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Department of the Treasury (DOT) seeking records related to the investigation of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michel Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Breitbart News spoke exclusively to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who said, “We’ve been looking into this story for months now and the only crimes connected to this Russian scandal we’ve been able to find so far are the illegal leaks of information and the violations of privacy by the Obama gang.”

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA on January 25, 2017 and only filed the lawsuit after the agencies failed to respond. The FOIA request was for “Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the investigation of retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak between October 1, 2016 and the present.”

The suit claims that “Defendants are violating FOIA by failing to search for and produce all records responsive to Plaintiff’s requests or demonstrate that the requested records are lawfully exempt from production.”

In a prepared statement, Tom Fitton commented:

President Trump is on to something. The Obama-connected wiretapping and illegal leaks of classified material concerning President Trump and General Flynn are a scandal. Judicial Watch aims to get to the truth about these crimes and we hope the Trump administration stands with us in the fight for transparency.

The lawsuit points out that on January 23, 2017,CNN reportedthat the government was investigating Flynn, former national security adviser to President Trump, and said:

The calls were captured by routine US eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats, according to the intelligence and law enforcement officials. But the officials said some of the content of the conversation raised enough potential concerns that investigators are still looking into the discussions, amid a broader concern about Russian intelligence-gathering activities in the United States.

The officials all stressed that so far there has been no determination of any wrongdoing.

Radio host Mark Levin has outlined a sequence of events — expanded on by Breitbart News — that shows how, starting in June 2016, the Obama administration filed requests with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications targeting Donald Trump and several advisers. Just prior’s to CNN’s report cited by Judicial Watch, theNew York Timesreportedthat the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Treasury Department were monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign.

"Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation's capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. Trump."

"Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media."

As the news of the potential wiretapping of the Trump campaign has finally found its way into the headlines and the never-ending leaks emanating from the Obama Administration holdovers continue to be exploited, whatever national chaos and retribution that may ensue rests not only on the shoulders of the perpetrators but on enablers in a sycophantic mainstream media and a feckless Republican Party.

Since 1989 and the election of George H.W. Bush, the vast majority of Republicans elected to national office have chosen to worship the twin gods of civility and compromise rather than vigorously defend and promote liberty, free enterprise and limited government. Meanwhile, their political adversaries, the Democratic Party and the Left (now one and the same) had no such compunctions as they were determined to achieve their ends regardless of the means. Among the means were endless intimidation, extortion and ridicule of the Republicans in Congress or either of the two George Bushes. All this without fear of retaliation or even the slightest hint of a vigorous defense or response.

In conjunction with their accomplices in the mainstream media, Democrats quickly ascertained that any outrageous accusation on their part, such as that Republicans are determined to starve children, would eventuate in the near complete surrender of any opposition to their proposed policies -- all of which are now embedded in American society. Further, rather than support their colleagues in the Party who were oftentimes the victims of specious and malicious accusations, the spineless elites in the Republican Party sacrificed their members on the altar of civility and faux integrity.

Having experienced so much success with these tactics, it is little wonder that after nearly three decades the Democrats’ overconfidence could be their potential long-term downfall.

That eventual bridge too far may well be the wiretapping of the Trump campaign by the Obama Administration and the putting in place of the apparatus for the subsequent leaking of hitherto confidential information by the Obama holdovers in an effort to delay, marginalize, or destroy the Trump Administration.

Apparently, Barack Obama and his minions were supremely confident that Hillary Clinton would win. Or if by any remote chance she did not, the assumption seemingly was that Trump and the Republicans would be their usual spineless selves and succumb to the customary intimidation tactics and would never retaliate once in office. Additionally, the Democrats could count on the mainstream media never exposing their treachery.

Despite all their voluminous opposition research and Trump’s own words, the Obama-Clinton cabal, brimming with overconfidence, refused to accept the reality that he was not a prototypical Republican or someone easily extorted. Any cursory review of his business career and tactics would have disabused them of that mindset. Had Obama not been so arrogant, he would have realized if his administration pushed for the wiretapping of his political rival in a contested election campaign that Hillary had better damn well win or Trump could and would retaliate once in office. As the President of the United States can declassify and make public anything he so chooses, Obama’s allies in the media would not be able to sweep the potential scandal under the rug.

That hypothetical eventuality may have come to pass as President Trump has decided to use the power of his office to expose the potential duplicity and unscrupulous behavior of the Obama Administration in the wiretapping of his campaign. A story first reported last November in an expose by the website Heat Streetand followed up by The Guardian (UK) in January.

There is another component in this intrigue that is part and parcel of the overall Obama deviousness.

On January 12, 2017, a week before Trump was inaugurated, in a dramatic reversal of a longstanding policy, Obama issued an executive order allowing the NSA to share with 16 other agencies, filled with Obama holdovers, vast amount of data gathered on private American citizens. Data collected without warrants, court orders or congressional authorizations. Thus, assuring that innumerable leaks, such as those surrounding General Mike Flynn and others in the Trump Administration, could occur.

The wiretapping and the deliberate strategy to undermine one’s successor are perhaps the most egregious political actions by any president in American history, far surpassing Watergate or the Teapot Dome scandals. In fact, they are tactics that would have been applauded by some of the despots of the past century.

Complicit in this skullduggery is the mainstream media. For the past forty years, they have been virtually unquestioning in their dealings with the Democrats while vilifying the Republicans at every turn. They became, in essence, the Praetorian Guard for the Democratic Party, allowing its members to get away with virtually anything. The latest example is the mainstream media’s willfully choosing to ignore the wiretapping reports already in the alternative and foreign media while gleefully accepting the leaks in their collusion with the Democratic Party elites.

There is little doubt that the media in this nation is now more polarized than ever. As its traditional income sources evaporate, the mainstream media is increasingly dependent on web traffic for advertising revenue. Therefore, the incentive is either to produce and promote sensationalism or publish stories tailored for a specific audience regardless of the overall veracity in reporting.

Jonah Goldberg at National Review recently explored this phenomenon (as he noted the following at the Washington Post):

(Ben Domenech) told me the Post has a giant screen on the wall of the newsroom that displays in real-time their web traffic. Ben noted that nearly all the most read stories were anti-Trump. He asked whether we can rely on the press to be objective when market incentives are for Trump-bashing all the time.

The media in the United States is now split between the anti-Trump and pro-Trump venues. During the previous 8 years, the mainstream media was almost exclusively pro-Obama primarily because of ideology and today they are almost exclusively anti-Trump primarily because of revenue. As a counterweight, there is now a significant pro-Trump media, chiefly on the internet, which also relies on web traffic for their livelihood. The schism is now a fait accompli and will not be reversed anytime soon. Unfortunately, the anti-Trump media is still dominant but seemingly hellbent on losing that status, as they have tossed to the wind many years ago any pretense of objectivity.

Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media.

Judicial Watch: Only Crimes in Russia Scandal Are from ‘Obama Gang’

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Government transparency activist group Judicial Watch has filed aFreedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuitagainst the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Department of the Treasury (DOT) seeking records related to the investigation of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michel Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Breitbart News spoke exclusively to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who said, “We’ve been looking into this story for months now and the only crimes connected to this Russian scandal we’ve been able to find so far are the illegal leaks of information and the violations of privacy by the Obama gang.”

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA on January 25, 2017 and only filed the lawsuit after the agencies failed to respond. The FOIA request was for “Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the investigation of retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak between October 1, 2016 and the present.”

The suit claims that “Defendants are violating FOIA by failing to search for and produce all records responsive to Plaintiff’s requests or demonstrate that the requested records are lawfully exempt from production.”

In a prepared statement, Tom Fitton commented:

President Trump is on to something. The Obama-connected wiretapping and illegal leaks of classified material concerning President Trump and General Flynn are a scandal. Judicial Watch aims to get to the truth about these crimes and we hope the Trump administration stands with us in the fight for transparency.

The lawsuit points out that on January 23, 2017,CNN reportedthat the government was investigating Flynn, former national security adviser to President Trump, and said:

The calls were captured by routine US eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats, according to the intelligence and law enforcement officials. But the officials said some of the content of the conversation raised enough potential concerns that investigators are still looking into the discussions, amid a broader concern about Russian intelligence-gathering activities in the United States.

The officials all stressed that so far there has been no determination of any wrongdoing.

Radio host Mark Levin has outlined a sequence of events — expanded on by Breitbart News — that shows how, starting in June 2016, the Obama administration filed requests with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications targeting Donald Trump and several advisers. Just prior’s to CNN’s report cited by Judicial Watch, theNew York Timesreportedthat the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Treasury Department were monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign.

PERHAPS THE FILTHY SAUDIS WILL BUY UP ALL THEIR BOY'S BOOKS! THE OBOMB SERVED THEIR INTERESTS FOR 8 YEARS!

“Under Obama, not a single leading banker was prosecuted for the

criminal activities that led to the biggest financial disaster and

deepest slump since the 1930s, destroying the jobs, life savings

and living standards of tens of millions of workers in the US and

around the world.”

"Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5 million— is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the wages, benefits and living standards of the working class."IT LOOKS LIKE THE OBAMA'S WILL SUCK IN MORE LOOT THAN THE CLINTONS AND THEIR PHONY PAY-TO-PLAY CHARITY FOUNDATION DID.

"A month ago we commented on a study that concluded “the Obamas could earn as much as $242.5 million from speeches, book deals and pensions.” That study estimated a book deal for the couple would be worth $40 million. The Obamas have topped that by $25 million, or 62.5 percent. This pushes their estimated post-White House earnings toward the $300 million mark."

Executives at Penguin Random House, the global publishing giant, announced Tuesday that the firm had reached an agreement to publish books by former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama. Vanity Fair commented, “The couple will write their books separately but sold the book rights jointly.”

The Financial Times reported that Penguin Random House had won a record-breaking auction between publishing houses and will buy the two books for more than $65 million. It is not known which one of the company’s numerous imprints will publish them. The previous record for a presidential memoir belonged to Bill Clinton—$15 million.

In a press release, Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle (the publisher is owned 53 percent by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann) explained: “We are absolutely thrilled to continue our publishing partnership with President and Mrs. Obama. With their words and their leadership, they changed the world, and every day, with the books we publish at Penguin Random House, we strive to do the same. Now, we are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs. Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance.”

A month ago we commented on a study that concluded “the Obamas could earn as much as $242.5 million from speeches, book deals and pensions.” That study estimated a book deal for the couple would be worth $40 million. The Obamas have topped that by $25 million, or 62.5 percent. This pushes their estimated post-White House earnings toward the $300 million mark.

As we noted in early February, Obama is being paid for the services he rendered the financial oligarchy during his two terms in the White House. Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5 million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the wages, benefits and living standards of the working class.

The man who promised “change” and whose election was termed a “transformative event” by the American pseudo-left proved to be an implacable defender of big business.

The WSWS has reported several times that during Obama’s administration the wealth of the richest 400 Americans grew from $1.57 trillion to $2.4 trillion and the stock market enjoyed one of its most successful runs in history.

Now Obama plans to vacation with billionaires, play golf and “cash in.”

The announcement of the $65 million deal has not been accompanied in the media by any criticism, much less shame or revulsion, nor are the Obamas presumably embarrassed in the slightest. On the contrary, the media and Obama’s admirers treat the book deal for the most part as a tremendous accomplishment, something to be immensely proud of, just as the news anchors now gloatingly report record share prices or billion-dollar box office successes.

Political life in the US has reached a stage at which the representatives of the immensely wealthy are immensely wealthy themselves, or the immensely wealthy rule directly, as in the case of Donald Trump. Official American politics is a closed-in, sealed-off universe of money and privilege.

The Chicago Tribune pointed out some years ago that, after completing his term in office, “Thomas Jefferson was forced to sell his 6,000-volume book collection to the government—forming the core of the Library of Congress—to pay off his creditors; his debt-ridden successor, James Madison, pleaded in vain for a loan from the new Bank of the United States; and the next president, James Monroe, was so impoverished upon his death in New York that his family could not afford to send his remains back to his native Virginia.”

None of those ex-presidents requested a pension. “In these early years, with the revolution against King George still a fresh memory, a lifetime government sinecure smacked too much of royal privilege.”

Now we have this, according to the New York Times: “Speculation about the Obamas’ books and how much they would sell for have been circulating in the industry in recent weeks, as executives at the top publishing houses met separately with the former president and first lady. Some publishing executives who followed the bidding process said that the opening offers for Mr. Obama’s book alone were in the $18 million to $20 million range.”

BLOG: THE HISTORY OF A PSYCHOPATH - THE MAN THAT YELLED "HOPE & CHANGE" AND BECAME GEORGE BUSH'S THIRD AND FOURTH TERMS ON STEROIDS!

If Barack Obama were to write an honest book, it would be worth something. If he were to reveal the forces that picked him up at a relatively early age, seeing in him a marketable political commodity (both white and black, liberal and conservative, foreign and American), and how those forces assembled and packaged him and carried him into the White House, well, that would be valuable.

Of course, that will never happen. The new book will no doubt be even more repugnant than the last one, The Audacity of Hope (2006). As we observed in our review of that work on the WSWS in February 2007, “Is there a single honest or original thought in Barack Obama’s new book? If so, it does not immediately come to mind.”

We wrote that Obama’s work was “a calculated effort, from its title to its final page, designed to demonstrate his readiness to take the reins of political power in the US. That is to say, while Obama directs portions of his book toward sections of the more well-heeled and complacent Democratic Party faithful, those most inclined to wishful thinking, the audience that primarily concerns him consists of the powerful corporate, financial and media figures who organize and ultimately shape the campaigns of the two major parties’ candidates.”

But Obama’s new memoir will have so much more to cover up or ignore: the multi-billion dollar Wall Street bail-out, the halving of auto workers’ pay, the illegal drone strike murders of thousands, the unprecedented growth of social inequality, the reactionary health care initiative, the disastrous wars or interventions in Libya, Syria, Yemen … And one could add, the election of Trump itself, the fitting climax to two terms during which Obama disappointed, disillusioned and angered tens of millions, opening the door to the most sinister administration in American history.

The Times editors, of course, have only one thing on their collective mind, or rather two, race and money: “A frank discussion of his [Obama’s] time in the White House, and of issues like race relations in America, could reach an even wider audience, becoming a worldwide blockbuster. Penguin Random House, a global publishing house with more than 250 imprints, has worldwide rights to the books, which means the company can make a good deal of money overseas and in translation.”

Meanwhile, contrary to the Obamas and their apologists, Penguin Random House and the corrupt media, great numbers of people will be disgusted by the $65 million payoff and the profound discrediting of the entire American political system, with its ultimately revolutionary implications, will continue apace.

Under Obama-Clintonomics, the rich became VERY rich and we got the tax bills for their bailouts and crimes! Trump and his Goldman Sachs regime will double the numbers of rich and quadruple the number of LEGALS living in poverty.

"Secondly, for eight years Russian businesses and businessmen closely aligned with Putin pumped millions into the Clinton Foundation slush fund, paid her husband a half-million dollars for a single speech, and got in return a substantial portion of our uranium assets when, as Secretary of State, Hillary okayed their purchase."

Obama Did Wiretap Trump: It’s Like Putting Together a Russian Nesting Doll

Matryoshkas are Russian nesting dolls. Inside each doll are several others, smaller but identically shaped characters, until you get to the smallest one inside. Studying what we have learned of the timeline -- and we still don’t have the entire story -- we see Wikileaks, the smallest, at the core, and Obama as the largest piece in what is the most historically outrageous misuse of the people and institutions of government for partisan advantage.

Wikileaks

During the campaign, Wikileaks posted a number of email messages from the DNC -- largely Podesta, but Hillary as well. The communications (not well reported, but, in any event, more embarrassing tittle tattle) had been on unsecured accounts, poorly guarded and easily accessed because of carelessness on the part of the Hillary team. Assange, who published them, denied the source of this information was Russian hackers. This now has been confirmed by the heads of our intelligence community, but the Clinton camp claim that the Russians did it set the stage for the notion that her opponent was the favored candidate of the Russians.

Apart from the fact that our intelligence services have denied the claim, there are a number of reasons to believe that the Russians would have preferred Hillary to Trump. For one thing, Russia is in terrible financial shape and relies on its sales of oil and gas to Europe to stay afloat. Is it sensible to believe that the Russians would prefer Trump, who made clear he wanted to vastly increase U.S. oil and gas production, over Hillary, who gave every indication of keeping it down and the worldwide price of oil and gas higher? (I can’t imagine -- for the same reason -- that Iran and OPEC wouldn’t prefer her as well.) Why you do suppose the Russians have been funding “green” groups in Europe -- and possibly here -- who oppose fracking?

Secondly, for eight years Russian businesses and businessmen closely aligned with Putin pumped millions into the Clinton Foundation slush fund, paid her husband a half-million dollars for a single speech, and got in return a substantial portion of our uranium assets when, as Secretary of State, Hillary okayed their purchase. Finally, John Podesta, chair of Hillary’s presidential campaign wasclosely aligned with Russian interests. His brother was hired by the Russians to lobby for the uranium sale. He was on the board of a company closely aligned with Putin.

As the crack investigative reporter Richard Pollock notes:

John Podesta, national chairman of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, may have opened himself up to a Russian “influence campaign” designed to temper his views of the Kremlin, The Daily Caller News Foundation (TheDCNF) Investigative Group has learned.

Influence campaigns are conducted by many governments -- including the United States -- with the aim of influencing decision makers in other countries to realign their geopolitical worldviews more closely to the influencing country.

Some national security experts interviewed by The DCNF wonder if Podesta may still be a target of Russian influence. They trace the campaign back to his company board membership, in which one-third of the board were top Russian businessmen with direct ties to the Kremlin.

The last time Podesta talked negatively about Russia was Dec. 18, 2016, when he charged in an NBC “Meet the Press” interview the 2016 election was “distorted by the Russian intervention.”

The former Clinton national campaign chairman has since been silent, even as other former top Clinton aides, such as Robby Mook, Brian Fallon and Jim Margolis have repeatedly aimed high-decibel rhetoric at President Donald Trump about Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential race.

[snip]

Podesta’s silence is particularly striking, according to retired Air Force Col. James Waurishuk.

“We haven’t heard very much from Podesta lately, particularly on the subject of Russia’s interference in the elections,” Waurishuk told the DCNF. He served on the National Security Council and worked on “information operations” for military intelligence.

The suggestion is that he’s staying out of it because the Russians want this chatter about their influence silenced.

In any event, Russia has now been cleared of the claim, yet in the recesses of the dimmer voters’ minds the charge remains a cogent explanation of why their candidate lost the election.

The National Security Agency and the FISA

The NSA engages in global monitoring for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. It does by passive means (signals Intelligence) and active means like physically bugging systems and through subversive software. It assists and coordinates SIGINT elements at other government organization like the DIA.

Domestic communications can be intercepted under two circumstances: in the first instance to protect us against sabotage or international terrorism or sabotage. In such a case, when authorized by the president through the attorney general, it can be done without a court order provided that it is for only one year and only to acquire foreign intelligence information and there is real likelihood that a U.S. person is a party to the communication. Even then it must be done in such a way to minimize the impact on the U.S. person. The attorney general must report such surveillance under seal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and report their compliance to both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Surveillance can also be done on a court order from FISA when the attorney general persuades the court that there is probable cause (i.e. a reasonable suspicion) that the target is a “foreign power” or an “agent of a foreign power” and the minimization requirements for information pertaining to U.S. persons will be followed. Such orders may be approved for 90 days,120 days, or a year.

FISA court authorization is almost always granted. Reliable reports indicate that the Obama administration sought authorization in July of last year when Trump appeared a likely opponent (the application is still secret) and it was denied. These reports also state that a pared-down application was sought in October and granted by the court. We have no idea on what basis the Department of Justice sought these warrants nor who the purported target was.

From the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, we learned this week that Trump team’s conversations were caught in the surveillance, that for over nine months this was never reported to his committee. Moreover, it is public knowledge that three days before the inauguration in January, for no legitimate purpose, President Obama authorized wide distribution of the surveillance reports to 16 other agencies, the names of U.S. persons involved in the conversations were not redacted, the contents were of no intelligence value and they were widely leaked -- a perfectly predictable consequence of spreading the raw data so widely in contrast to normal redaction and dissemination patterns. Suspicious minds like mine think may well be to further hamper the incoming administration by leaks designed to embarrass members of his team. Nunes also reported the post-election spying “had nothing to do with Russia.” By January 20, for example, the New York Times reported that Trump had been wiretapped.

We learned this week from Nunes’ work that the investigation is continuing.

On his own Mike Rogers, head of NSA, met privately with Trump shortly after the inauguration. We have no details of their discussion, but my guess is he told him what had happened and how. At the moment, Rogers appears to be the sole white hat in our intelligence network. But he may not be the only one, which, I think, would mean a number of former Obama officials have to be looking for lawyers.

Tom Lipscomb, a former reporter and online friend, thinks the white hats in the intelligence community fed the truth about the wiretapping directly to Trump so he could weed out from their ranks the Obama confederates. Like him, I think the Trump tweet that he was wiretapped was smart. He’s giving “fair warning to what is coming,” and the claims that Trump was engaged in some “crazy conspiracy” are evaporating just as had the earlier nonsense that he and the Russians were conspiring via Wikileaks.

Christopher Steele and John McCain

Christopher Steele is a former British intelligence agent of dubious character and credibility. He had been hired early by the Clinton camp to dig up dirt on Trump. When Hillary ended that agreement, unnamed Republicans engaged him to continue, and when they stopped paying him, the FBI -- for as yet unexplained reasons -- took him up. His “dossier” is preposterous, based on accounts to his aides from unnamed and thus unverifiable sources. In the rare instance when they provide recognizable details, they have been proven false. As incredible as the “dossier” was, it was used to tar Trump with salacious nonsense and to further encourage the ridiculous notion that he and his team were Russian agents.

There are three different versions of how John McCain, a bitter #NeverTrumper always seeking media cuddles and enamored by globalization, came to get the dossier -- he says, in December. In one version, he got it from a member of the McCain Institute, in other published accounts he dispatched someone abroad to get it, and in a third he first heard of it from a former British ambassador while at a meeting in Halifax. That he’s offered various tales in itself suggests some dissembling on his part. Nevertheless, he concedes he widely distributed the scurrilous dossier to the media and members of Congress. He was either a useful dupe of those determined to bring down Trump or a willing partner of theirs.Right now, he’s flailing about abroad, attacking the president and moaning that Trump hasn’t yet met with him.

The Media

John Nolte, writing for the Daily Caller, highlights how it is apparent that the media knew of the spying operation and later covered it up:

“Of course the media knew what the Obama administration had done. First off, when they thought the news would hurt Trump, the national media publicly reported on the fact that the Obama administration had spied on Team Trump. It was only after that knowledge became a liability for Precious Barry that the media pretended otherwise. In other words, they LIED.”

According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a leak of classified information. Michael Flynn was not, as far as we know, a target of any U.S. government surveillance. He was one of the figures whose conversations was “incidentally” recorded, presumably as part of the regular monitoring of Kislyak.

People within the U.S. government are not supposed to take the information that is incidentally recorded and then run to David Ignatius because they don’t like the American citizen who was recorded. That’s not the purpose of our domestic counterintelligence operations. Even if Flynn had violated the Logan Act -- which, as we all know, no one has never been prosecuted for violating -- there are legitimate avenues for dealing with that, namely going to law enforcement and a prosecutor.

(Invoking the Logan Act in this circumstance is particularly nonsensical, because the interpretation Ignatius floats would criminalize just about any discussion between a presidential candidate, a president-elect or his team and any representative of a foreign government on any matter of importance. If you ask a foreign official if his country would make a concession on Issue X in exchange for a U.S. concession on Issue Y, BOOM! Call out the SWAT teams, we’ve got a Logan Act violation!)

There are a lot of reasons not to like Michael Flynn, but that doesn’t change the fact that somebody broke the law and leaked classified information in an effort to get him in trouble. That is wrong and that is illegal, and Nunes is right to point out we’re going down a dangerous road when information collected by U.S. intelligence agencies about American citizens starts getting strategically leaked for partisan purposes.

No matter how many dolls are hidden in the nest -- Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch -- it is undeniable that they all fit under the big one -- Obama. It was he who authorized the surveillance and multiagency distribution of intelligence -- in Bob Woodward’s reading, “highly classified gossip” -- about political opponent Trump and his team -- invading their privacy in violation of the law.If you were inclined to want Americans to lose faith in their intelligence community and media you couldn’t have done a better job than they did themselves. The Russians didn’t have to do a thing.